Original Release: C’s Laboratory, 2014, PC
A simple belt-scrolling beat-em-up with bad gameplay but some high-effort art, and brutal treatment of its (not very competent) heroine
Slave Girl Ena (PC, C’s Laboratory, 2014)
Where to Buy: DLSite (demo available)
Review by: Master-B
Also known (by me) as “Battles of Useless Heroine,” Slave Girl Ena is another one of those games that kinda gets at cross purposes with its fetish. As the name indicates it’s centered on a hapless slave girl elf getting abused by guards and monsters and etc., but puts you through tedious gameplay in which she’s just a pain to handle and not up to the task of taking on the waves of enemies that come at her.
So Slave Girl Ena has the ability to make damaging magical power waves with her hands … but we quickly see why she got captured anyway, as they barely do any damage to even common mooks who totally no-sell them if they’re already in another animation while being hit. The only other things she has going for her are a limited amount of “barriers” that can be set, which protect her while standing in the middle of them and damage any enemy that bumbles into them, and a flip-jump in which she’s invincible in the middle frames but not at the start and finish of it.
You work through four levels, each capped off with a boss battle. Each level goes on ABSOLUTELY FOREVER and it’s nothing but the same three slaver guys and a dog in each one, just in massive repetitive quantities. Right from the beginning they take forever to pick down and are quite fond of backshotting you while you’re tied up with someone else, whether that be throwing a tomato at your head (which stuns this idiot girl for like a full minute) or just walking up and casually administering highly damaging spankings and fingerings. Ena has some other weaknesses you have to deal with, like the fact that she gets pushed back away from the enemy with every successful hit, and the flip-jump seems to just pick a random direction for you to be facing when you land (meaning it’s extremely unreliable for jump-in attacks).
So the gameplay is a janky slog, and the creator seemed to recognize that as they allow you to simply unlock everything from the main menu right from the beginning without playing. I get that the fetish here is seeing the unfortunate elf girl get humiliated and all that, but why do I have to play a bad game to get that? This is one of those things where I question why they don’t just make an animation or video or whatever of what they want to see.
H content is also a little iffy. It’s all in-game sprite stuff, and you only get one animation each for the three slaver types, and there is only one boss that has animations of this type upon defeat. There is also one static CG per level you’re defeated in. Everything is also a little on the brutal and rough “ryona” side, it’s not too graphic but a lot of scenes have blood leaking out as the slave girl experiences the tyranny of evil men.
The naughty animations are decently done, but otherwise there’s nothing to recommend here if you’re not like deeply into the concept and fetish. It’s definitely not one to come to for the gameplay. But, they’re only asking a couple bucks for it atm on DLSite, and you can make it kinda-playable by setting it to Easy mode, if the art or theming is really doing it for you.
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